Even before he released Lethal Company and helped catapult the burgeoning co-op horror genre forward, solo developer Zeekerss had a sizable collection of horror games under his belt. His latest game, Welcome To The Dark Place, is an unnerving text adventure enhanced by deeply atmospheric audio. Speaking with GamesRadar+ over email, Zeekerss says he didn't begin his game dev journey with horror; it just felt right.
"I didn't start by making horror games, but I found my home in this genre," Zeekerss says. "I don't know why, but it feels like fear has been my primary emotion ever since I was a kid. But it's a deeper thing; the emotional spectrum of fear and courage, hope and despair, is my way of interpreting the world. As an artist, it's my first language. I can branch out to other genres, but they'll always find their context in that."
On Steam alone (to say nothing of his Itch.io profile), Zeekerss also has It Steals, a first-person survival horror "experiment" built around stealth; Dead Seater, where you explore a vacant estate and avoid "what lurks there"; and The Upturned, likely the closest ancestor to Lethal Company with its many scurrying monsters and physics-based gags.
I asked Zeekerss how he would define the games he makes and wants to make. "My goal is to delight the player," he explains. "I love that word. And for me, when I hear 'delight', surprise and awe is what I think of first. There was a YouTube video by the channel Errant Signal about my games, in which he said I have an 'impish nature' and that my games are like a 'series of practical jokes on the player.' And that has always stuck with me because it's so perfect."
Welcome To The Dark Place explores and manifests a particular avenue of Zeekerss' mind. "When I was a kid, maybe 10 years old, somebody loaded up Zork on the family computer and let me loose," he recalls, referring to developer Infocom's 1977 text adventure. "I remember feeling like it was the most realistic and mysterious game I had ever played.
"Besides that, Kentucky Route Zero enamored me with its magical realism. That game does this thing where it dives into dizzying, text-based 'rabbit holes' in which you tell yourself the story. Then there's Stories Untold, which uses text-based sequences to great effect. These all left an impression."
When he was finally constructing his own text adventure, Zeekerss says Welcome To The Dark Place "was like audio design boot camp." To paint scenes alongside text, he edited freely available sound effects, trying "very hard to layer and mix these recordings, since some of these sounds are very recognizable and over-used, and now I can't unhear them in other games!" Family and friends also contributed some voice acting and music, giving it a personal touch.
Ironically, though he reckons "the strength of the text-based genre is that its scope isn't limited by the need to make 3D models and textures and mechanics," this approachability had its own traps.
"As soon as I think of something, it can be playable," he says. "But that made it very easy for this project to spiral out of control. At times it was maddening. Then there was the audio-based aspect of the game, which required me to meticulously make sound effects for everything that I thought up; I'd write and write and write, then regret it afterwards when I had to do the audio work."
"I repeatedly put it on hold to work on other projects, including Lethal Company," he says of Welcome To The Dark Place, which had been in the works in some capacity for roughly a decade, preceding all of his Steam release dates. "You have to beware of becoming so attached to a massive project that you chain yourself to it, because that's how you kill it for good."
